Weekend, Games, and Some Counter-Rants

[marinredwolf]

Need more long weekends. Was this was restful because it was three days long, or because it was one more day than usual (ie. would I get accustomed to three-day weekends)? Either way, I didn't do much. Finished repacking the books I moved and slept in some. Not exciting and sometimes even depressing, but restful. Of course, this morning sucked at

Comments

[tashiro]

Fair enough, but then the question becomes: 'what is the point of playing if you have to deliberately dumb your character down just to participate?' It becomes demoralizing for the person who's taken the time to get their character to the point where they can deal with problems they've encountered before or have experience with.

Or hell, it doesn't even go that far:
Shadowrun -- I'm a shaman. I can conjure spirits. I've picked up the psychometry and divination metamagics.
GM -- Nice, but I'm running a murder mystery, you're going to have to not use those metamagics. And you're not allowed to talk to local spirits to find out what went on.
Player -- Wait, what?

Admittedly, on a MUCK, you have to deal with a larger base - but you also have to deal with such in LARP and other group-RP organizations. It isn't fair for people who want to get things done to restrain them because others aren't interested in moving forward.

[marinredwolf]

Tabletop: That's about where the GM and player(s) should, and probably would, sit down and coordinate a little better on expectations of the game. Or the GM could try to roll with it. I'm totally fuzzy on SR rules these days, but figuring out why spirits can't/won't help in the investigation could be a whole 'nother layer to a mystery...

MUCK: Standing up on a soapbox and saying, "I'm within my rights, so what you're saying doesn't matter!" even in polite terms, isn't helping anything, it's making it worse. Ideally, the question being asked and discussed among players should be more along the lines of "how can we make everyone feel involved?" Frankly, I think (and I've said before) that Faire's way too lacking in limitations on things like magic, but it's sort of too late to do much about that now.

But then, I'm a cynic. I don't have much faith that people could 1) discuss issues like that maturely without getting all confrontational and 2) actually come up with some solution that would work. So... meh...

[tashiro]

The only solution I could reasonably see (and I don't see it as a solution) is to go low-fantasy. Cut magic off at the knees, and severely cripple what it is capable of. As an experiment, I decided to look over the D&D Druid list, and make a list of spells to use as examples of what Velekii can do with magic - and even the 2nd to 3rd level spells give him a lot of versatility in a roleplaying situation - so you'd basically need to strip everything down to about 2nd level spells and less to give anyone else a chance.

And that's just scratching the surface. People who have influence, or good weapons, or allies, can all skew a plot, by being able to do things which the person running the plot doesn't want done.

[marinredwolf]

Yeah, well, some limitations would have been nice. Magic that can do anything is sort of ridiculous. But I've spoken on that subject before.

"Train" people to walk the fine line between still challenging characters like yours without trivializing their abilities and/or "lesser" characters? No idea how you do that, though. Ultimately, that's only one among many factors why I've all but given up running plots on Faire. But that's probably a topic for another depressing-ranty post entirely.